It was a scenario that security services feared would happen, against a backdrop of international tension ever since the terrorist attack by Hamas in Israel on Saturday, October 7. On Friday, October 13, an man carrying a blade entered the grounds of the Lycée Gambetta-Carnot in the town of Arras in northern France and stabbed several people.
One teacher died, another was injured, and a security guard was hospitalized "in a state of absolute emergency," according to a police source, after being struck several times with a knife. "The perpetrator has been arrested by the police," announced Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
A number of videos posted on social networks show several people attempting to subdue the assailant in the schoolyard, using a chair as a shield. The attacker kicked and punched them and also used what appeared to be a knife. He was arrested shortly afterwards, as was his brother, whose involvement in the attack is not yet known. The case has been referred to the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office on charges of "murder and attempted murder in connection with a terrorist undertaking" and "terrorist criminal association".
Since the beginning of the week, Darmanin has been holding a series of security meetings with top-ranking officials from the police, gendarmerie and intelligence services, to try and prevent any risk of "contagion" – a ramping of tension due to the international situation. While most anti-Semitic acts reported over the past week have been the result of "weak signals" – messages posted on social networks, insults or cries of "Allah-u Akbar" – several intelligence officials have raised concerns with the interior ministry about "an atmosphere conducive to acts" by people operating alone, making it more difficult to detect them in advance.
"The atmosphere is reminiscent of fall 2020," one of them said, "when the issue of Mohammed cartoons came back to the fore and there was growing tension across the country." On September 1, 2020, the day before the opening of the trial for the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre, in which 12 people were killed and five wounded by the Kouachi brothers, the weekly had once again published satirical cartoons mocking the prophet of Islam and triggering a series of hostile demonstrations across the world.
Three weeks later, on the morning of September 25, 2020, Zaheer Hassan Mahmood, a 25-year-old Pakistani armed with a butcher's cleaver, injured two people working for a TV production company near the newspaper's former premises on rue Nicolas-Appert, in Paris's 11th arrondissement, before being arrested.
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